First let me say I am very impressed with the TFT shield.
I have this connected to an Arduino Uno and have written a couple of applications that provide user interaction through the touch screen. And they work great.
At the weekend I bought the Seeed Bluetooth shield from Radioshack and decided to stack it with the TFT. I set the tx and rx to D0 and D1. I did not modify my software as I just wanted to see if the touch shield still worked.
here is a link to the bluetooth shield that I bought
Bluetooth shield use D0,D1 which is hardware serial port to transmission. But you can change it, might be your codes also used D0,D1 too. So change to software serial port and try again. If you upload the codes, use the board isolation without TFT or Bluetooth shield.
You said to change to software serial port, how do I do that?
You also said use board isolation without TFT or Bluetooth, I don’t understand what tht means. Can you ore someone else clarify what that is?
Is there a tutorial somewhere on setting this up?
Since Radioshack is actively advertising the TFT, Bluetooth and Arduino I guess I won’t be the only one asking these questions.
I can help write a tutorial once I understand what to do
I set up the software to use A4 and A5 by changing
#define RxD 6 #define TxD 7
to
#define RxD 18 #define TxD 19
Then put a jumper wire in A4 and A5 of the socket of the bluetooth shield and connect them to D0 and D1 of the bluetooth shield???
Do I remove the jumpers that are on the D0 through D7 rx/tx selectors?
and where does A4 go to D0 or D1 and A5 D0 or D1?
It looks like after you assign those two analogs as the software serial TxD and RxD you should jumper them to pins on the BT_RX and BT_TX header rows respectively.
In other words: #define RxD 18 // (Arduino receives data on A4) --> BT_TX (BT Shield sends data on BT_TX) #define TxD 19 // (Arduino sends data on A5) --> BT_RX (BT Shield receives data on BT_RX)
You do not want to connect the software serial analogs or the BT TX/RX pins to D0 & D1 because those are in use by USB/the Arduino IDE.
See the diagram on the wiki page for wiring info:
In looking at the schematics of both products in Eagle it appears that the Bluetooth shield is using ADC1 for its status bit and the touch screen is using ADC1 for X-. This could be why the touchscreen is misbehaving. If you turn off the status bit switch on the BT shield does it behave any better?
#define RxD 18 // A4 of Arduino jumpered to BT_TX row #define TxD 19 // A5 of Arduino jumpered to BT_RX row
PIO[1] is set to N/C (No connection)
I removed the jumpers that connected BT_RX and BT_TX rows to 0 through 7 Pins
then jumped A4 of Arduino to BT_TX row and A5 of Arduino to BT_RX row
I first tested to make sure the bluetooth worked using the slave sketch and used my Apple Macbook pro as the master.
I then connected up the TFT and loaded my TFT sketch, the TFT worked.
I then combined the Bluetooth slave sketch with my TFT sketch and had the data received from the Apple displayed on the TFT
I then removed the USB connection to my Arduino Windows Dev platform and powered up the Arduino/Bluetooth/TFT with a 9v battery
It all worked.
My issue now is that the range on the Bluetooth is not what I had hoped for. I know it is advertised as 10 meters and that is about what I am getting.
For the project I am working on that may work if I have several slave units to receive but would need to keep pairing and unpairing.
Is there any way to increase bluetooth range?
I have a pair of RF boards on order and will see if they have better range.
If anyone wants the full details of how I got the TFT and Bluetooth working together post to this thread and I will put something together.
